His long war

National Review, April 30, 2007 by Mark Riebling

The book has its flaws. Hunt repeats himself (the Soviets were active in Montevideo, e.g., at pp. 95, 99, and 102). His advice in the book's last line--to re-empower "daring amateurs"--seems like a recipe for another Watergate.

Yet one of Hunt's main lines of thinking has merit. To him, the Cold War was not primarily a political struggle, but an intellectual one. That's why Hunt hired William F. Buckley Jr. into the CIA in 1951 to translate the memoir of a Peruvianex-Maoist. Whether the media today are books or blogs, audio or video, human nature is the same. We are what we think. To change how people act, we must change what they believe.

"We shouldn't bomb Al Jazeera television," Hunt counsels. Instead, "we need to buy it--through a third party, of course. Then slowly and subtly change the news slant to deprogram all the negative brainwashing that has occurred."

If the wisdom of that plan is debatable, the need for inventive propaganda is clear. In the war against head-chopping ideas, we should remember one lesson that E. Howard Hunt did learn well, before he died on January 23. "When we were fighting Communism, the most useful weapons didn't explode--they had pages, a volume control, or a great personality. They still do."

Mr. Riebling is the author of Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11--How the Secret War Between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security.